–Imma be going to Memphis for a few days to see my best friends that I haven’t seen in an appallingly long time.

–K and Jon are getting married. I’m excited for them.

A for apprehension:

–Mum’s birthday and Mother’s Day the very next day…things always seem to get tense on these days…and my youngest sister is going on her senior trip and will be gone for them. I’m sure it won’t help matters.

–Imma be going to Memphis. This means I may well come back to find I’ve shed my wolf coat and gone back to being something darker and deader. Unless I really don’t care like I used to. That could also be the case.

A for…angst:

As of now, I still have my metaphorical canid form…and I’m good with that. The flares of intense anger that I’d been experiencing for the past year+ have died down a bit…I haven’t been prompted to verbally destroy anyone in months, and while I’ve still been mentally agitated off and on, the last really bad day I remember was way back in January. So instead of being an evil wolf creature that exhales flames, [insert random photo that may or may not properly depict what I’m talking about]

I’ve been quite normal. I still have teeth, of course…not giving those up any time soon…but I haven’t felt the need to use them much.

And it seems like I’ve been succeeding also at avoiding the yawning void I used to feel inside myself. I think I’m too cautious to assume it’s closed itself up…but I don’t feel depressed like I used to. A little unhappy from time to time, of course…but not so much so that I feel zero desire to get out of bed, or that I would have to fight the urge to weep just because someone’s said something kind to me.

But I’m still concerned. I feel like…with all this other stuff now out of the way for the moment, there are other things now that this part of me is working on. It’s like…my mind seems to work in two adjacent rooms, or rather…a room divided by a nearly-opaque curtain. I function primarily in one part, but there seems to be another me operating in the other half of the room, and whom I can only see dimly and only half guess what I’m doing…

It would almost be like being me and not-me, but that’s not the case. When I’m being really, really honest with myself, I can see it all, just for a moment. And I know what I’m doing and what the obscured portion of me is doing…but I can’t seem to focus on it long enough to really keep that curtain drawn aside…it falls back down and I can only see the outline of myself standing on the other side.

Of course, this way of describing how I feel is super creepy and now I wish I hadn’t thought of it like that at all. I much prefer when it’s my Wolf and I and we can see each other. Then it feels like whatever self-deception is going on here is less…I don’t know…malevolent?

There’s something about the image of myself through the curtain that gets distorted in ways that can never happen with the wolf. I mean, I know what a wolf is, no matter how distorted and monstrous it becomes, whereas the blurred image against the curtain…? I say it’s me, but how can I really know that? In the moments of understanding, when I feel sure I know what’s going on, I never remember the face I see. Maybe there isn’t one…but if there’s no face, I can hardly believe it’s myself.

I cannot imagine myself without a face.

I’d much rather have the image of the wolf, who is separate enough from me that I can touch it, and me enough that I can feel the fingers curling through my fur.

(And now I have to let all this talk to people? Yikes. That’s what I meant about an A for angst—the conversation; that’s what I’m worried about.)